Interview with the Band of the Week: Tough Lovers

Check out our interview with Tough Lovers lead singer Jamie Smail below, and view their full feature here.

Tell us about your upcoming CARIBOO BREWING PRESENTS: ALS (Lou Gehrig’s Disease) Benefit Show @ ELECTRIC OWL show. What made you want to put on a benefit show?

“A charity show for ALS is something we had always talked about doing. The development program / competition we are currently involved in requires us to do some sort of a charity benefit so we immediately chose ALS. Both myself, and Dane have lost family members to the horrible disease so the choice was an obvious one.”

How did the band originally form?

“The band originally started out as solo bedroom recording project of mine. A friend of mine at the time was promoting a weekly night at a club and had asked me to play. I decided I better find a drummer, and I knew that Graham, our guitar player, had a drum kit so I asked him if he’s play with me. We rehearsed a couple of times and showed up to the venue with an electric acoustic guitar, and a reverb pedal. We used the house drum kit. After that we started jamming a lot and decided that we’d better find a real drummer, and a bass player. Graham dropped the drum sticks and picked up his guitar to start playing lead. That’s when Dane our bassist and Ryan our drummer joined. I had been playing music with Dane for years before throughout high school. Ryan had posted an ad on Craigslist looking for a band to join, so we auditioned him and the rest is history.”

Favorite show you guys have put on to date?

“We truly enjoy each and every show. We recently got asked to play Olio festival here in Vancouver and it was the first show after learning all about live performance up at the peak performance project boot-camp. It was the first chance to showcase a bunch of new ideas that we had been planning and they all really paid off.”

Any plans to come play in the US?

“Currently we do not have any plans to head down to the US, but definitely have talked about it and are hoping to do so in the latter part of 2013.”

Our favorite song off of “Good Morning” is ‘Surrounded’ what is yours?

“We love them all, but we really love playing before the sun sets live. It takes on a new dynamic on the stage and is filled with a lot more energy than the recording gives off.”

Do you guys have plans to release a full length CD?

“Yes! We are heading into the studio in early 2013 to start recording our debut full length record.”